from the web-3.0 dept

Here's an odd one. Yesterday, I saw that a top story in the technology subreddit was a claim that Facebook was blocking Imgur, the popular image hosting service (especially popular with Redditors, but which we use here as well). This screenshot was shown (hosted on Imgur, natch):

A few hours later, however, an interesting comment popped up on the Reddit thread, from a user "fisherrider," who claimed to be a Facebook engineer taking responsibility for the situation. What's somewhat stunning is that when companies screw up something, you almost never get this level of honesty about the nature of what happened (especially directly from the person who screwed up):

Hey folks - so this is actually my fault. Literally, I'm the guy who accidentally blocked imgur for a brief period of time today. I'm really sorry.
Some background: I'm an engineer who works on the system we use for catching malicious URLs. In the process of dealing with a bad URL that our automated defenses didn't catch, I ran into a rare bug that caused us to incorrectly block some legitimate URLs for a brief time. Right after I figured that out and removed the bad data, I reworked the UI so no one will get bit by the same issue in the future.
As a form of apology that I'm sure is insufficient, here is a picture of my dog dressed up for the 4th of July: https://imgur.com/pR4mR

As some have noted, this really is a fantastic apology. It's not filtered through PR and actually seems to come from someone who sounds human -- which is pretty important in the midst of the Reddit faithful. But it should spread beyond just Reddit. When companies screw up, this is a pretty good lesson in how to respond. Admit to the screwup, be clear and honest about it, and explain what happened and what's been done to prevent it from happening again. And... don't let it near a PR person.

Reader Comments

Facebook is also blocking links to my site for no reason

FB Purity is one of the top rated browser extensions on addons.mozilla.org and yet facebook is blocking links to the fbpurity.com website, something is seriously wrong here. FB Purity is a very highly rated and well respected browser extension, that lets you customise and clean up your facebook experience. For Facebook to block links to the site and claim they are "spammy and unsafe" is libellous and and also ironic, considering it helps block spam on facebook.

Facebook need to come clean over this and unblock the site, like they have done with the imgur debacle.